Comments on: Retrieving Aero Glass base color for opaque surface rendering

By: Quentin Calvez

Quentin Calvez — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 04:42:30 +0000

In the Glass/NotGlass debate, for those using .net 4 (and MetroTwit does), performances in animations between both are not living in the same world. I do prefer the look of NoGlass, but sometimes that’s not an option…

By: brian

brian — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 07:19:46 +0000

I think glass is okay. I like it

By: evan

evan — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:01:35 +0000

thanks,love’t

By: 9633a

9633a — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:06:38 +0000

good ,thanks

By: Rafael

Rafael — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:21:00 +0000

I think my post here answered your SO question, not sure what else you need to get color information.

By: Ian Boyd

Ian Boyd — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:32:55 +0000

i asked this same question on Stackoverflow, trying to get an answer to the real question: “What is DwmGetColorizationColor returning?”. You can see the question at (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3560890/vista-7-how-to-get-glass-color)

Also, i love your screenshot much better, so i stole it as a template for my question.

By: Darren

Darren — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 03:30:11 +0000

Ok, this is awesome stuff. However, what about setting the color?

By: Lucktube

Lucktube — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:12:54 +0000

Agreed that glass is ugly.

By: Roman

Roman — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 23:05:35 +0000

Thanks for this alternative to using the registry!
It’s certainly less code to write, but will it also perform better? (I think perfomance is always an important point, no matter how little some method seems)

@GRiNSER:
I believe Google Chrome uses the native window frame but draws onto the non-client area.
Not sure though about using skins in chrome if that is still no custom framing.

But I agree that too many applications apply their own window borders :(

By: Vincent

Vincent — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:25:14 +0000

Totally offtopic: UxStyle Core is now one year old! Yeah :D

By: GRiNSER

GRiNSER — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:55:40 +0000

MS guidelines say that you shouldn’t change the window frame behaviour unless you create a real benefit.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa974173.aspx
Actually I prefer glass more than these custom window frames because most of them either don’t fully recreate the original Windows placement or behaviour and some render much slower/with artifacts.

Google Chrome, iTunes, MetroTwit, Zune, to name some I know, all have their different takes on the top right window controls. Some of them forget to arrange the controls differently between windowed and maximized mode for example (which the original glass frame does).
MetroTwit, iTunes, Zune Player sometimes also render really badly – you get to see the shadow of the windows first, the content area shows up later.

I think MS is here to blame on some of these bad behaviours and rendering issues. Besides I always hated these graphical glitches like flickering and such in Windows, not only at the custom window frames, but also with e.g. normal content resizing… I hope they will finally step up and deliver a more glitch-free Windows desktop experience like they will provide with Windows Phone 7 in the mobile space.

By: ngyikp

ngyikp — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 15:27:48 +0000

A better solution than this is to /not/ use custom windows in the first place :)

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 12:54:22 +0000

Great stuff, amazing really. I’ve done a fair amount of development, but no dis-assembly or reverse engineering. It seems like black magic, can anyone recommend a class or books that would be good to get started?

By: Christo27

Christo27 — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:07:42 +0000

Agreed that glass is ugly. Got tired of it after 6 months, I’d say.

I wonder if this is the same way that Windows Live Mail finds the glass color?

By: Rafael Rivera

Rafael Rivera — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:24:00 +0000

Glass is ugly.

By: lula

lula — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:50:12 +0000

No glass on metrotwit? Why not?

By: Vincent

Vincent — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:34:56 +0000

Thanks for this piece of information, I always wondered why my form background color, which was set to use the DWM window border color, went crazy “sometimes”.

By: Panda X

Panda X — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:22:54 +0000

I’ve always wondered. What’s the Afterglow and Balance’s do?

By: Singh

Singh — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:38:57 +0000

God, I love reading your blog posts. I’m not a dev, but it does give me a welcome insight into the world of devs.

By: Leo Davidson

Leo Davidson — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:28:00 +0000

Given the choice of both unsupported methods, I think I’d go with the registry with a bit of validation/sanity-checking.

Neither is ideal but I figure calling an undocumented ordinal means you might crash in the future if the function or parameters change meaning (rather than disappear) while the worst that can happen with the registry is you don’t find the colour or you use a bogus colour.

Still interesting stuff, though.

It’s a shame the public DWM API is still so basic with so much hidden and undocumented (or barely documented). Hopefully now that it’s a mature API (i.e. the internals shouldn’t need to change too much) it will be opened up a bit more in future versions of Windows.

By: Jaryth

Jaryth — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 09:59:15 +0000

“and cause the Earth to tilt”

I had that happen once… was NOT cool! ;)

reverse engineering is fun, although you tend to go a bit further then I take things! :D

By: Matt Sharpe

Matt Sharpe — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 09:44:05 +0000

Interesting stuff.